Forty years after one of world’s deadliest industrial disasters struck the Indian city of Bhopal, a cleanup operation has finally begun to remove hundreds of tonnes of toxic waste from the site.
However, local campaigners have accused the Indian government of greenwashing, arguing that the 337 tonnes of waste removed this week represents less than 1% of the more than 1m tonnes of hazardous materials left after the disaster and that the cleanup has done nothing to tackle chemical contamination of the area.
There have also been protests over fears that the incineration of the waste will only lead to further contamination and toxic exposure in other areas.
At about midnight on 2 December 1984, the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal exploded, releasing 40 tonnes of toxic methyl isocyanate and other lethal gases into the air.
More than 3,000 people were killed in the immediate aftermath and at least 25,000 are estimated to have died overall.
Local groups have claimed the true number is probably even higher due to the long-term effects of the poisonous gas, which include high rates of cancers, kidney and lung diseases. High numbers of babies have been stillborn or born with severe disabilities to gas-affected mothers in recent years.
Despite the scale of the industrial disaster, a proper operation to remove all the toxic waste from Bhopal has never been carried out, either by the US company Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemicals, which was the majority owner of the factory at the time, or by the Indian government, which took back control of the land where the factory stood.
Rights groups have accused the US corporations and the Indian government of attempting to play down the lasting impact of Bhopal’s untouched chemical debris.
Official surveys submitted to the courts have shown that the contamination, which includes highly poisonous heavy metals and UN-banned organic pollutants, has spread to at least 42 areas in Bhopal. Testing near the site revealed levels of cancer-causing chemicals in the groundwater were 50 times higher than what is accepted as safe by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Lethal levels of toxic waste have also been found in factory pits and festering open ponds where the waste was being dumped by the Union Carbide factory prior to the explosion.
For years, campaigners have been fighting for Union Carbide and Dow Chemicals to be held liable for the cost of the cleanup and safe removal of the waste, a process which is expected to cost upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars, but the US corporation has always denied liability, citing a 1989 settlement with the Indian government.
In what was initially taken as progress, last month the Madhya Pradesh high court ordered authorities to finally take responsibility for the chemical waste, criticising the inertia of the past four decades and asking whether the government was “waiting for another tragedy”.
However, the government has now removed 337 tonnes of overground waste that had already been put into containers and moved to a warehouse in 2005, which campaigners claim no longer posed any significant threat and was not contributing to the groundwater contamination.
Rachna Dhingra, a coordinator of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, called the move a “farce and greenwashing publicity stunt to remove a tiny fraction of the least harmful waste” and questioned why Union Carbide and Dow Chemicals were not being held accountable.
She said: “There’s still 1.1m tonnes of poisonous waste leaching into the ground every day that they refuse to deal with. We can see for ourselves the birth defects and chronic health conditions. All this does is take the heat off the government and lets the US corporations off the hook. It does nothing to help the people in Bhopal who for decades have been seen as expendable.”
Dhingra was also highly critical of the government’s decision to take the removed waste to be incinerated at a plant 150 miles away in Pithampur that has previously failed tests on conducting such operations safely and exposed local people to high levels of toxins.
The incineration, which is likely to take about six months, will create 900 tonnes of toxic residue, which will then be buried in landfills. The move has provoked large protests by people in Pithampur who are fearful of further toxic exposure and leakages into their groundwater from the waste.
Swatantra Kumar Singh, the director of the state government’s Bhopal gas tragedy relief and rehabilitation department, denied there was any contamination risk to the local ecosystem and said the waste would be disposed of in an environmentally safe manner.
Many local people and human right groups consider the Bhopal disaster to be a continuing miscarriage of justice. The 1989 settlement led to most victims being given 25,000 rupees (about $500 at the time), while most of those who developed related conditions or died years later got nothing at all.
None of the nine Indian officials who were convicted in 2010 over their roles in the disaster served any time in prison, and Dow Chemicals has maintained in the courts that it is not criminally liable for the actions of Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary before it bought the parent company.
Campaigners have accused the US government of blocking attempts to extradite Union Carbide and Dow Chemicals officials to face justice in India over failures that led to the explosion.
